495. Uytai!

Thanks for the comments and clarifications; as far as plate tectonics are
concerned, my own imaginings consist of the half-forgotten fragments of a
year of college geology, combined with features blatantly ripped off from
Earthly geography. :-)

With regard to Bronze Age warfare and horses: it's true that before the
invention of the stirrup, fighting from horseback was difficult to do.
There seem to be two main solutions: one (as you noted) was using the horse
for transport to the battlefield and/or cavalry charges, followed by
fighting on foot. (I have some questions of my own about the charging part:
I can see riding to the battle site and dismounting, or charging into the
enemy and back again to safety--but if a cavalry force charged and was then
forced to dismount and fight, it seems to me that you'd have a lot of
uncontrolled horses getting in the way of everyone, not too mention getting
killed themselves--you could lose a lot of valuable horses that way. Maybe
the fighters thought it was worth it?)

The other solution was the use of wheeled vehicles--specifically the war
chariot, which provided a mobile platform that the warrior could strike
from, while a second man did the driving. War chariots go back to the
second or third millenium B.C. (the Hyksos' invasion of Egypt and before)
and were used in Europe, the Middle East, India, and China, but they seem to
have always been the vehicles of leaders and champions alone (i.e.,
Cuchulainn in Ireland, Arjuna in the Indian Mahabharata--with the
god/avatar Krishna as his driver), both because chariots were hard to
mass-produce, and the horses themselves were expensive to keep and feed on a
regular basis.